Packet services and carrier Ethernet services for providing enterprise services associated with voice, video, and/or data packets are experiencing widespread market adoption. “Packet services” generally refer to services provided over packet networks. “Carrier Ethernet services” refers to services provided by telecommunications network providers (carriers) using Ethernet technology in their networks. Carrier Ethernet services can thus be considered a subset of packet services.
With the increased popularity of packet service technology, bandwidth demands are growing, which in part is leading to increased demands for enterprise service automation. Carrier Ethernet services are also the foundation for new enterprise services, such as cloud data center services, Long-Term Evolution (LTE) mobile communications, and other packet technology services, which are also experiencing widespread market adoption.
In efforts to manage existing packet technology services, providers must rely on network engineers or administrators for providing custom designed solutions for service configuration and packet network connectivity. This requires extensive manual software design, labor intensive coding, and technology specific modeling prior to network activation. Such services are expensive to provide, time consuming, and slow to deploy.
Presently, there is no technology-independent service designs, configurations, or packet network connectivities that may be implemented within networks associated with various packet based domains. Notably, technology independent models are desired for supporting packet flow inspection, shaping, and configuration at any access point in a packet based network. Furthermore, systems and methods for visual design support and/or adequate modeling for complex multipoint-to-multipoint (MP2MP) services for all major packet based domains do not currently exist.